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I was out walking with my son recently, and I pointed out where a row of iron stumps could be seen, protruding from the limestone capping on a low wall outside a civic building. As anyone who grew up in the UK knows, our built environment bears these scars from the early 1940s, when Britain found itself under siege and struggling to re-arm against the Nazis. Park railings and the gates of historic buildings were cut down and hauled away as part of the war effort.

Then and now: removal of railings from public spaces

Giving up their railings proved to have a positive effect on the morale of the nation: it offered visible proof that something was being done, and virtually everyone was happy to join in. Vast quantities of iron were collected – but the evidence for it being used is somewhat scantier. Chemically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with reclaimed cast iron: it can be melted down and made into things like bomb casings… but the historical record that includes photographs and newsreel footage of people cheerfully giving up their railings isn’t matched by anything showing said railings arriving at the foundries in places such as Port Talbot or Sheffield.

Even Buckingham Palace joined in the recycling effort…

So where did the iron go? It’s hard to be certain: a few people have suggested that the government was caught out by the sheer quantity of material collected. They couldn’t use it all, but they appreciated the morale-boosting effect of the project and allowed it to continue. Were our park railings quietly dumped at sea? Some think so. As I researched this article, each anecdote that I followed up seemed only to reference another, with no hard evidence resulting: let’s just say that the dumping hypothesis is widely believed, among those who have expressed an interest. (The aluminium pots and pans that were also collected at this time do appear to have been made into Spitfires, however.)

Did the railing recycling scheme fail because supply exceeded demand? Perhaps so, but I didn’t want to complicate the issue for my six year-old. We just looked at the row of stumps sticking up out of the wall, and imagined the railings made into tanks and bombs – just as Lord Beaverbrook, Minister for Supply, must have intended.

There is another, still more complicated twist that I won’t bother the lad with, either – and for this nugget of knowledge we must thank what must be one of London’s most ‘niche’ interest groups, the Stretcher Railing Society (“For the promotion, protection and preservation of London’s ARP Stretcher Railings”).

A civil defence organisation set up in 1937, Air Raid Precautions (ARP) prepared for the worst. This was at a time when it was believed that the bomber would always get through. In consequence over 600,000 stretchers were manufactured, to cope with the vast number of casualties that were expected.

These weren’t very comfortable stretchers: just a tubular framework covered with a metal mesh. Their utilitarian nature was quite deliberate, though, as they would be easier to decontaminate after a gas attack.

After the war, some of those stretchers were upcycled into railings. At perhaps a dozen locations in London, new housing estates acquired railings with a distinctive ‘bulge’ at the ends of every panel: these had been the feet of the stretchers, and they’re a dead giveaway that you’re looking at no ordinary bit of fence, but a piece of our history. They’re every bit as much a sign of the war as the funny little stubs of cut-away iron that still adorn so many of our public spaces.

Upcycled stretcher-railings

Very early on in this blog, I felt the need to explain why recycling doesn’t really work. We can’t afford to think of an item that we’ve finished with as a collection of chemical elements, to be reduced to their simplest state before reuse. If we do that, we waste all the effort, ingenuity and – critically – the energy that went into shaping our stuff. Because recycling is so often downcycling (reuse of the material with degradation caused by contaminants) we make life a little bit harder each time we send our materials around the loop.

McDonough and Braungart (2002) made the case for upcycling, which might be understood to mean finding new uses for unwanted items such that they don’t become waste. A key point here is that the upcycled product should have a higher value than it had at the point it ceased to be wanted by the previous owner.

If you accept that definition then most of the examples of upcycling that you will find will beart projects. Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” was an early one, made from a couple of bits of an old bicycle. It’s fun, and some will say it’s art great art (personally, I’d say it’s no Guernica, but… whatever).

So, um… yeah. All we have to do with our waste is make it all into sculptures.

This kind of upcycling does nothing to solve the problems of our age. Paul Bonomini’s “WEEE Man” conveys a powerful message about how much e-waste we each generate, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions. In fact, a cynic might say it serves to keep three tonnes of material out of the recycling loop.

It might sound like a Glaswegian term of endearment, but the WEEE Man is actually a former exhibit at the Eden Project in Cornwall, showing the amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment an average Briton will throw away in their lifetime. (No word yet on what happens to sculptures at end-of-life…)

If we all get creative and upcycle all our waste into art, we could actually increase the demand for virgin material. How much art does a society need? Taken to the extreme, we’ll be drowning in art instead of drowning in waste. This is why the ARP stretcher railings have such an important lesson for us: they haven’t been turned into something that’s only for looking at, and unlike art installations we don’t only need one: the more you reuse, the better. Also, in their new life they’ve been in use for something like seventy years, far exceeding the useful life seen in their primary purpose.

Perhaps upcycling needs a broader interpretation of value, where it’s not about price, but utility – but if we do that, there’s really not very much upcycling going on at all.

‘Liter of light’ – the people using old lemonade bottles to make improvised light pipes – is still looking good, though.

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I recently went to the excellent RAF Museum at Cosford, with the particular aim of seeing one rare ’plane – but not in the conventional sense.

The aircraft in question was sequestered away inside a pair of “conservation tunnels”, being sprayed with a citric acid solution for reasons of preservation. Was my journey down to Shropshire a waste of time, then? No! Admittedly I don’t usually drive 130 miles so that I can fail to see some wreckage while it’s being drizzled with dilute lemon juice, but this was special.

My interest was in a virtual representation of the aircraft, and after an extensive search (caused by human error[1]) I found two of them hovering a few metres above the tarmac in the overflow carpark.

Found at last: the Dornier 17, in a car park. The scale is a bit off, apparently.

Quite a convincing takeoff… except that the propellors aren’t spinning.

Apparition Dornier 17 is a free iPhone app, described as “A virtual window into the past, using augmented reality and location based media to recreate aircraft and their stories for the world to see and experience.” Promotional hyperbole aside, what it means is that if you’re in the right location and you waft your telephone around, a ‘live’ 3D model of said Dornier 17 is superimposed upon the feed from your camera. Walk around the location and you get to see the model from various angles. The app was developed by the Middlesex University Design and Innovation Centre and sponsored by Wagaming.net – the people behind ‘World of Tanks’ and other computer games.

I wanted to see how well the technology worked, but the aircraft itself is an interesting one as well. The Dornier Do 17 was a light bomber, used mainly by the Nazis. More than two thousand were built but not a single one survives intact today.

And the one in the tent, marinated in citric acid? In September 2008, the wreckage of a Do 17 was located on the Goodwin Sands, six kilometres off the coast of Kent. It had been on the seabed since August 26th 1940 when the aircraft took part in a raid against RAF stations in southern England. It was damaged by defending fighters and forced to ditch in the sea.

Due to the threat posed by thieving scuba-souvenir hunters, the find was kept a secret until arrangements could be made to recover it. In 2013 it was raised from the seabed and delivered to the restoration centre at Cosford – where the aforementioned citric acid solution is being used to wash away the salts and barnacles that have encrusted the wreck.

The last of her kind… and somewhat the worse for wear after being shot up and then left in seawater for decades.

A very long period of conservation work may lie ahead, but in the meantime we can see the machine in virtual form… although not from the comfort of your armchair. You still have to get out and visit a location. I doubt this is because the RAF Museum is particularly desperate to drum up business: not least because admission is free. What’s more, you can see virtual Dorniers in dozens of other locations around the world…but you do have to get out and find them.

Some of the Apparition Dornier locations (image: Google Maps)

Is this the Pokémon Go of history? Fitbit for sedentary aviation enthusiasts? Well… kind of. I’m quite taken with this synthesis of technologies. It introduces an apparent limitation in that the virtual world doesn’t exist purely for our convenience and we have to get out and navigate physical space if we want to enjoy it, but that’s actually evidence of a very clever system. If you can look through a “virtual window” and see a Dornier 17 in the distance, you might be able to use the same technology to answer the perennial question of supply chains:

Imagine using your phone not to dial up a call centre and listen to muzak while you wait for the chance to gripe about the non-appearance of your latest purchase, but to actually see where it is in real time, your magic vision reaching beyond the horizon. To know that your package isn’t merely ‘out for delivery’ but that it’s no longer stuck in that eight-mile tailback on the M62, and is now speeding towards your location… wouldn’t that be something? Or how about arriving at your local ‘click and collect’ store and not having to wait while a member of staff sorts through a pile of boxes that looks like that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’? If, instead, you could peer through your own “virtual window” and see exactly which boxes are yours – and perhaps receive additional information such as a video on safe handling for heavy boxes.

Apparition Dornier shows a video about the conservation project, if you choose to look in the right direction: the two tents in the background aren’t open to the public, but the app gives me magic vision, allowing me to see inside.

My ancient iPhone 5 worked perfectly well for this, which suggests that all but about four percent of smartphone owners could have a “virtual window” of this kind, if they wanted. The model I saw was a bit clunky: up close the surface could be seen to be pixellated, and perhaps it could have been rendered to match the real lighting conditions, for additional realism… but this is a product of electronics and information technology, and it’s a few years old now: if my life has taught me anything, it’s that we can expect something a lot better to come along within a few years.

Having a close look at the landing gear. Could an augmented reality app one day help an engineer to perform maintenance tasks?

What else might we do with the technology? All kinds of things. A company could offer a permanent ‘virtual open day’ to anybody who stopped by the front gate, telling the community about all the good things they’re doing. A walking tour of the city walls of London could be made much more interesting if you could actually see them, instead of merely being told where they once stood. Perhaps an artist’s installation no longer needs no to be constrained by mundane limits such as planning permission, budget, or gravity: come and see the Colossus of Rotherham… and so on.

The window on the past is surprisingly futuristic, then. In fact, I think the world just acquired an extra dimension.

[1] You need to allow the Apparition app to have certain permissions on your phone, including access to your current location, or your “virtual window” won’t show you anything.

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If you think that ‘SPSS’ refers to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software tool, as used by so many of my students, think again. Today we’re in the domain of law enforcement, looking at Self-Propelled Semi-Submersibles.

Back in the 1980s, the preferred method for getting cocaine from Colombia to Mexico was to make a dash in a “cigarette boat” – a small, fast vessel that might otherwise be used for offshore powerboat racing. Similarly, during the era of prohibition, “rum runners” had used speed to evade the US Coast Guard.

That’s the way things were done, back when we were all watching ‘Miami Vice’ on TV, but running drugs by sea became a much more difficult proposition when radar coverage was improved and the Coast Guard were equipped with better boats of their own. (How unsporting!)

The drug smuggling business is a simple matter of economics: the cost of a kilo of cocaine when it leaves a jungle lab in South America is around $1,500 but it will have a street value of $50,000 or more when it reaches a major US city. Profits like that mean there is no shortage of people who are prepared to try their luck in the smuggling business, and they also allow a lot of scope for investment in the supply chain: hired muscle, firearms, bribes for officials… and narco-submarines.

Rumours that submarines were being constructed for the purposes of drug-running had been heard throughout the 1990s, but it was a long time before one was actually seen. Meanwhile, they acquired the nickname Bigfoot, after the legendary forest-dwelling cryptid: everybody’s heard of the beast, but few can claim to have seen one.

In November 1988 a submersible ‘capsule’ 6.4m in length was found off Boca Raton, Florida. It had been designed to be towed behind a boat, and could be submerged by remote control. When discovered it was empty: whatever it had contained had already been smuggled into the USA.

For a while, this was the only hard evidence to support the submersible drug-smuggling hypothesis. Then in 2000 a half-finished submarine was found in a warehouse in the suburbs of Bogotá, the Colombian capital. Documents in Russian were recovered from the site, suggesting a Russian mafia connection, or perhaps that Russian technicians had been involved in the construction project. This wasn’t the first such connection: in 1995 an émigré from the former Soviet Union had been arrested in Miami while trying to broker a deal between the Russian mafia and the Colombian cartels, concerning the sale of an old Soviet submarine.

Inside the half-built submarine that was found in a warehouse in Bogotá. If completed it would have been able to transport over 180 tonnes of drugs, submerging to evade law enforcement.

News of the Bogotá find flashed around the world: Bigfoot had been found.

It wasn’t until 2006 that the US Coast Guard caught a Bigfoot at sea. A cutter encountered a strange vessel 145km southwest of Costa Rica. It was around fifteen metres in length, and featured three snorkels. On board they found four men, an AK-47… and 2.7 tonnes of cocaine.

The first Bigfoot, seized in November 2006, is now on display at the Joint Interagency Task Force South. [Photo: Department of Defense / Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro]

This wasn’t a true submarine, but a semi-submersible: a simpler and more affordable craft that can reduce its buoyancy until there’s almost nothing visible above the waterline. Others, often lumped in with semi-submersibles are in fact low-profile vessels, but their purpose is the same and either type can be put together in the jungle without requiring the kind of materials or skills that will attract attention. (Building a true submarine in Bogotá had proved to be rather conspicuous, not least because the city is 2,640 metres above sea level, which wouldn’t have made for an easy launch!) Semi-submersibles are typically made from fibreglass and wood, so if you can build a motorboat you probably have the skills and tools necessary to make a simple smuggling craft of this kind. Dozens of the things are being built every year.

This image of a narco-sub being seized shows just how absurdly small their profile can be.

For all their homespun simplicity, semi-submersibles are a very potent threat. The materials from which they’re constructed make them hard to spot on radar, and additional sneakiness is achieved by painting them the same colour as the sea and having them ride so low in the water that there’s almost nothing to reveal their presence. Exhaust gases from the engines are sometimes routed through long pipes that run under the boat, such that seawater provides a cooling function: such vessels aren’t going to show up on infrared.

Most narco-subs are very basic, but the War on Drugs has forced the pace of technological advancement, as the interior of the vessel on the right shows. [photos: Luca Zanetti]

There are other tricks, too, such as towed ‘torpedo’ cargo pods that can be cut loose if the smugglers are about to be boarded. The pod sinks, spends a day or two submerged and then surfaces again, using a radio beacon to advertise its position so that the smugglers can recover it. True (fully submersible) submarines appear to be of interest again, and there’s talk of GPS-enabled drone craft as well, although the cartels seem reluctant to entrust millions of dollars’ worth of drugs to automata just yet: perhaps because you can’t threaten a robot with reprisals against its family if it fails to deliver the goods.

A key weapon in the good guys’ arsenal is the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act, brought into US law in September 2008. This was the legislation that specifically named the Self-Propelled Semi-Submersible, and made it illegal to operate an unregistered one in international waters. Before that, any smuggler who got caught could simply scuttle their boat to turn a drugs bust into a ‘rescue operation’ from which no prosecution was possible as the evidence was lost. Nowadays, if you’re caught on board a Bigfoot, you go to jail for a very long time.

Some narco-subs are surprisingly sophisticated, such as this fully submersible example, seized in 2011.

Drug smuggling submarines have an interesting ancestor in the merchant submarine. In the First World War the Germans built two of these for the purpose of conducting trade with the USA – something that had become all but impossible due to an allied naval blockade. Deutschland and Bremen were developed and constructed using private funds, and launched in 1916. Deutschland made a highly successful trip to the USA, arriving in July 1916 with something like 680 tonnes of cargo on board. Chemical dyes, medicines, gemstones and mail were delivered, and then the submarine returned to Bremerhaven with a cargo of nickel, tin and rubber – vital war materials. As would be seen with Bigfoot ninety years later, the profit from a single voyage more than justified the cost of construction. Bremen set out for the USA on a similar trading mission in August 1916, and was never seen again. One theory is that she hit a mine, while another suggests a collision. Nobody knows.

Strangely proportioned for a submarine, this photo sees Deutschland in New London, Connecticut

Deutschland made a second successful trip in November 1916, and would have been sent out again but relations with the USA had soured and trade became impossible. In April 1917 the Americans entered the war on the allied side, bringing an end to the usefulness of the merchant submarine. Deutschland and others of the same type still under construction were converted to long-range ‘submarine cruisers’ and sent out to fight – with considerable success.

New merchant submarine applications have been proposed from time to time, although none has left the drawing board. In the USA, General Dynamics explored the possibility of submarine tankers for oil and liquefied natural gas, opening up arctic oilfields to wider exploitation. The Soviet Union also had plans to build submarine tankers and even a 912 TEU container boat, configured for trading routes beneath the polar ice cap… but the Soviet Union collapsed instead, leaving futuristic submarine cargo vessels as something that you’re only going to see on Thunderbirds for a while yet.

Like this:

Some time ago, I was stuck in a meeting. Not exactly The Meeting From Hell but definitely somewhere on the outskirts, like maybe Erebus, or Tartarus. Naturally enough, I decided to use the time more meaningfully, and began doodling.

Procurement, operations, distribution: those are the three elements of a supply chain strategy, according to what we tell our students.

I drew them vertically, for a change. I’m trying to get away from showing supply chains as going from left to right, but it’s a difficult habit to break: I spent years simulating supply chains, and the software packages we used were all designed to show products as flowing from left to right – a paradigm that doesn’t do us much good, really. Workpieces flowing from top to bottom fit the language of the supply chain much better: “upstream” and “downstream”, vertical integration and so on.

Following the “big three” I added an after-sales service component. Many modern supply chains include this, and thus far we’re not looking at anything that doesn’t appear in Porter’s Value Chain… if stood on its pointy tip. (Again, getting away from the left-to-right paradigm.)

So we’ve got a natural flow: gravity-assisted through procurement, operations, distribution and after-sales service. Next, I left a gap, which I called “uncontrolled life”. This represents the part of the life of a product where it has passed beyond any formal support, but remains useful to somebody. Like a car that has passed to its second or third owner, who decides that the declining value of the vehicle means it no longer deserves the premium demanded by the dealership: an independent garage works out cheaper on a per-hour basis and may provide access to ‘clone’ or salvaged parts.

Sooner or later, though, a product becomes too broken or too obsolete to be of use. It reaches the end of its life… but the supply chain may feature an ‘end of life’ phase where components or materials are salvaged. This is a growth area – not least because of legislation that establishes extended producer responsibility.

That first diagram offers a summary of the present-day position, perhaps, but it wasn’t always this way. For example, after-sales service is a relatively new concept that could only really take off once standardisation made it possible to sell spare parts.

I started wondering about how things have changed over the years (yes, the meeting I was in offered ample time for such reflections…) and by the time I’d thought it through I had a set of distinct ages illustrated, in a not-very-scientific analysis of the relativeimportance of the different components of the supply chain. You can see a neat version of my next doodle here:

Supply Chain Trends. Maybe.

Before humans, there was procurement and use – the way a chimp might find and keep a stone, so as to crack nuts. In a few cases, there may have been simple operations too, such as stripping the leaves and bark off a twig before it’s used to fish termites out of their mound.

Termites – it’s what’s for dinner. [Photo: BBC / Emma Napper]

In prehistory (defined as human activity after the invention of stone tools, but before the development of writing) we added distribution: the idea that you might share something with somebody else. Also, the range of operations that might be performed is expanded by human ingenuity: we were shaping tools, making mud bricks, curing hides and so on. At this point, ’end of life’ doesn’t feature at all; you just leave waste and worn out items wherever they happen to fall. Moving on into ancient history, this changes. For the first time, some forms of waste have value. If a broken item is made from copper or bronze it can be melted down and made into something else: recycling has arrived. Distribution also increases in importance in this era, for example Bronze Age Cyprus shipping copper to the Near East and Egypt, and returning with commodities such as papyrus and wool.

Technologies change, and empires rise and fall, but the relative importance of procurement, operations and so on doesn’t appear to change until the industrial revolution, when operations become particularly significant. For the first time, having an innovative means of production is more important than having access to the raw materials. (These are accessed more readily as a result of advancements in trade and navigation.)

I decided that mass production deserved to be considered as an era in its own right, beginning about a century ago. Again, we see a growth in the relative importance of operations – plus the arrival of the service component, which begins a squeeze on the uncontrolled life element.

In the information age – our own era – operations has declined in importance, because there’s more outsourcing (procurement increases in importance) and production increasingly involves alliances. Similarly, responsibility for the distribution function is shared with third-party logistics (3PL) partners. Growth in services is observed as companies look to establish a continuing revenue stream, and there is an increased focus on the end-of-life, the two combining to further limit the uncontrolled life element.

And what does the future hold? I think it’s reasonable to assume that end-of-life issues will continue to increase in importance. Outsourcing will grow; alliances and partnerships of all kinds, too – and the uncontrolled life of products will be further squeezed via business models based on leasing rather than outright ownership.

I’m not saying I have this 100% right, and the situation pertaining in a specific industry may be different… but it’s interesting to see how things have changed, isn’t it?

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In Greenwich, London, the Cutty Sark is a popular tourist attraction. A British merchant ship, she’s a rare survivor from a vanished, glamorous age of commerce by sail.

Exceptionally sleek and skilfully constructed, it’s a shame to have to report that this beautiful ship was just about obsolete from the outset: she was launched in November 1869… the same month that the Suez Canal was completed, changing the geography of global trade forever.

As a clipper, Cutty Sark was designed for the tea trade, then a highly competitive annual race (with cargo) from China to London. The journey involved sailing around the southern tip of Africa and steering a route that would make the most of the prevailing winds. Cutty Sark employed composite construction (wooden planking over an iron frame, all sheathed in Muntz metal) to produce an elegant, streamlined hull that made her one of the fastest ships of her time. It’s worth noting that she isn’t just a vehicle that used to be a part of the global supply network, but also a product of it: British wrought iron frames and metal sheeting, American rock elm, East India teak… all assembled on the Clyde.

Fast sailing over long distances (up to 363 nautical miles or 672 km in a day) was no longer confined to clippers, sadly. The SS Agamemnon had already been in use for three years, demonstrating the advantages of a high-pressure boiler and a compound steam engine – and when the Suez Canal opened it offered a 6,100 km shortcut that was largely unsuited to sailing vessels. The days of the tea clipper were numbered.

Long before the standard intermodal freight container, there were tea chests. A team of Chinese stevedores could load a ship with up to 10,000 of them in 2–3 days, and on her first return voyage, Cutty Sark brought 1,305,812 pounds (592 tonnes) of tea from Shanghai. Since there was no way to return them once empty, tea chests found all kinds of secondary uses in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, becoming storage boxes, furniture and even musical instruments.

Eight times Cutty Sark sailed in the tea season, one of a dwindling number of tea clippers. In December 1877 nobody in Shanghai was prepared to entrust their cargo of tea to a mere sailing ship (insurance premiums for steamships were a lot lower) and this marked the end of sail in the tea trade. Cutty Sark and the other clippers had to change with the times: they were modified to carry a simpler, smaller arrangement of sails that reduced crewing requirements and maintenance costs, and they carried new cargoes on new routes.

Reducing manning levels in an effort to cut costs… a reaction to hard times that shipping lines still employ today. Another tactic that we see employed almost universally today is slow steaming: reducing speed in order to save fuel. It’s a good response to industry overcapacity and the high price of fuel because reducing speed by about a third can save thousands of tonnes of fuel oil… but it’s amusing to note that this has reduced modern commerce to a speed that Cutty Sark could have bettered on a good day – without spending a penny on fuel, and without producing any emissions!

When the tea trade changed to exclude clippers, Cutty Sark began to carry wool from Australia. In the 1883–1884 season, she made a journey from Australia to London in 83 days, 25 days ahead of any other vessel. In 1885 Captain Richard Woodget managed to get the time down to 73 days. Cutty Sark dominated the wool trade for a decade… until the steamships moved in on that commodity as well. In 1895 she was sold to the Portuguese firm Joaquim Antunes Ferreira, and renamed Ferreira as a result. She traded general cargoes here and there, and by 1922 she was the last clipper still operating. A spell as a cadet training ship followed, and when she was no longer needed in that role she was installed in a purpose-built dry dock in Greenwich, becoming a museum ship in the 1950s.

After decades of sitting on her keel – an unnatural position that caused a certain amount of sagging – came an extensive conservation project, beginning in 2006. It was a textbook case of poor project management, featuring cost over-runs, poor record-keeping and questionable security arrangements… punctuated by a terrible fire in May 2007 that might have destroyed the whole ship.

Cutty Sark is part of the National Historic Fleet, making her equivalent to a Grade 1 Listed Building: destruction by fire is not an option. Fortunately, much of the fabric of the ship had already been taken away for conservation [photo: ITV.com]

In April 2012, Cutty Sark reopened after years of hard work. The most noticeable change is to the dry dock. In my childhood it was a simple pit where wind-blown crisp packets would tend to gather, but now it’s a glazed space, the roof appearing to be an ocean swell that the ship is riding. In the new scheme, Cutty Sark ‘sails’ some three metres above, allowing visitors a good look at her most important feature: that beautiful, streamlined hull.

Visitors can now walk beneath Cutty Sark’s hull, clad in a gleaming copper/zinc alloy that’s a close match to the original Muntz metal.

The end result of Cutty Sark’s renovation is controversial. The Victorian Society described it as a misguided attempt to fit the corporate hospitality market, and Building Design magazine named it the worst new building in 2012. (The ‘anti’ camp were hoping for a restoration that would have left Cutty Sark seaworthy.)Yachting World were more appreciative, though, describing the end result as sensational.

Cutty Sark will never again be able to return to the sea, but she still formed a focus for the ceremonies that preceded the Tall Ships race of 2017. At the Sailors’ Ball on Good Friday, dancers were dressed in their best vintage sailor chic, and after champagne and fireworks on deck, I enjoyed the opportunity to explore Cutty Sark without crowds, before we went below to dance. As the band played ‘Somewhere Beyond the Sea’, I felt as if I’d become one of the denizens of Rapture, the doomed city beneath the waves in the BioShock games: even so, count me among the people who approve of the Cutty Sark in her new role. For a ship that never quite worked out as planned, she has a surprising amount to teach us.

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Capacify has introduced readers to some distinctly odd forms of transport over the years, from missile mail to quick-turnaround aircraft with swappable passenger pods; from seagoing trams to transporter bridges. I like to bring you the good, the bad and the ugly of the logistics world, and today is no exception as we look at Brennan’s Gyrocar: monorail, the hard way.

When you design a train to run on a single rail, you’ve got inherent instability to deal with. One solution is to hang the cars beneath the track, as seen in the venerable Wuppertal Suspension Railway, or the H-Bahn at Düsseldorf International Airport. (There are others.) If you don’t mind supporting the whole length of your track on a series of elaborate pillars, this solution is fine.

Looking for a townhouse with a view of lots of girders? Look no further than Wuppertal!

If hanging down from an overhead track doesn’t appeal, another way to achieve stability is by straddling the guideway and using additional wheels that don’t bear the weight of the vehicle, but keep it steady. The Lartigue Monorail system featured a pair of guide rails on each side for just this purpose. The top rail was supported by a line of waist-high trestles that marched across the countryside and made it just about impossible to construct any sort of level crossing, so you’ve got a fairly impractical mode of transport here.

The Lartigue Monorail, Ballybunion

Strange but true: freight cars on the Lartigue Monorail were split down the middle like panniers, and loads had to be balanced. A farmer taking a cow to market would have to balance her with two calves, then split up the calves and put one on each side for the return journey. Nothing says “technical limitations” like having to give livestock an entirely needless tour of the countryside, but the Lartigue Monorail carried passengers, freight and bemused cattle between Listowel and Ballybunion from 1888 to 1924.

With me so far? [image: Fox Broadcasting]

Modern straddling monorails are in a sense descended from the Lartigue system, using guide wheels to ensure they stay upright, with a certain amount of friction and wear-and-tear as you might expect. So far so ordinary… but there is another way.

Why not gyro-stabilise your monorail, to keep it atop a much less substantial rail? That’s what Louis Brennan (1852–1932) proposed. Not just to keep it upright, either: if you’re clever (and Brennan clearly was) you can use the gyroscopic force of precession in your favour. He patented an arrangement whereby a pair of contra-rotating gyroscopes helped his machine to balance, and to return to the vertical when subjected to a load.

When it encounters a curve, Brennan’s patented gyro mechanism causes the car to lean into the bend, just as a cyclist would. In effect, to those on board the train, the banked turn wouldn’t feel like a turn at all: their weight would keep on pressing directly down through the floor of the vehicle. That offers a considerable improvement over conventional railways, which in some cases have to feature a bend radius as large as 7km, in order to keep the passengers comfortable. Brennan used to give demonstrations in which a scale model would make its way along a tortuously twisted piece of gas pipe, as described by Cleveland Moffett, a journalist for Munsey’s Magazine:

“As she comes closer we hear the low hum of her hidden gyroscopes (they will be quite noiseless in the larger model), and are struck by the car’s remarkable width in proportion to her length. She suggests a trim little ferry-boat, and is utterly unlike any known form of railway car. Now the track curves sharply to the right; she takes the turn with the greatest ease, and leans slightly toward the curve. Now the track turns again, and she glides behind the bushes. Coming out on the other side, she enters bravely on the approach to a mono-rail suspension-bridge, a wire rope stretched over the valley that falls away between two small hills — seventy-odd feet of tight-rope-walking for the little car. Straight across she runs from side to side, — no wavering, no tipping, — and then straight back again as the assistant reverses her; then out to the middle of the rope, where they stop her, and there she stands quite still and true, while the gyroscopes hold her. This is something never yet seen in the world — a mass of dead matter, weighing as much as a man, balancing itself unaided on a wire!”

History does not record how much pocket money Brennan had to pay his children for their part in monorail demonstrations

I found that old scale model in the chaotic part of the National Railway Museum that they call the Warehouse. Somewhat neglected and missing its cab, it alerted me to the existence of this strange mode of transport.

Detail of the Brennan Gyrocar model at the National Railway Museum [image: Stephen Holland]

Brennan imagined his full-scale vehicles would cross gorges on a ‘bridge’ consisting of a single steel cable, and ascend gradients of up to one in five. The guideway upon which it ran was simple – just a round ‘pipe’ shape on sleepers, far cheaper than the elaborate Wuppertal or Lartigue types. This will have been what attracted the British Army Council, the Durbar of Kashmir and the India Office to the idea, and they all reached for their chequebooks.

Brennan’s Gyrocar at the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910

A full-size prototype railcar (12.2m by 3m) was completed and running by October 1909, and it was first shown to the public at the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910. The monorail car took up to fifty passengers at a time on a short ride. Among those who tried it was Winston Churchill, MP, who would have been around 36 at the time. The gyro monorail had proved itself a workable technology… but there the story ends: no commercial system based on the technology would appear in the years that followed. Still, Brennan’s gyrocar had been demonstrated something like 63 years before the Advanced Passenger Train prototype rolled out – another tilting train concept meant to reconcile the conflicting requirements of curves, speed, and passengers’ comfort. Despite running on conventional tracks, the newer tilting train was plagued by technical troubles, and was withdrawn from service (although the Italians later managed to make the concept work, and called it the Pendolino).

For the gyro monorail, some problems clearly remain. For one thing, you can’t detect the presence of a vehicle on the track (for safety and signalling purposes) by the usual means of having the train itself complete a circuit, so an alternative way to ensure the line is clear would have to be found. (Hardly an insurmountable task nowadays.)

A bigger problem, of course, is that when your gyroscopes stop spinning, the gyrocar ceases to balance. This might seem to be a little bit worrying if your Brennan gyro train is on an elevated section, or perhaps crossing one of Brennan’s single-wire minimalist suspension bridges over a gorge. Actually, it’s not necessarily all that bad. Travelling on a straight section (such as that bridge) a single working gyro would be enough to keep a car upright: it’s only on curves where you need the contra-rotating pair in order to balance correctly. Also, gyroscopes that lose power take quite a while to spin down to nothing, so a gyrotrain driver with instrumentation ought to be able to take corrective action in good time.

The most significant limitation of the gyrocar technology isn’t apparent from the demonstrator on which our future Prime Minister rode. All the gyrocars ever demonstrated have been exactly that: cars, and not trains. Brennan’s paired gyroscope arrangement has to feature in every section of the train, with no such thing as a passive ‘trailer’ unit, since even if it doesn’t provide traction the coach or wagon must still feature powered gyros, or it won’t be able to balance. The rolling stock for such a transport network would cost a fortune.

Like this:

Rollin White was a machinist, working for Samuel Colt as a contract worker. At the same time, he tinkered with bits and pieces of scrap, and designed a firearm of his own. It wasn’t a practical or even workable design: it was inferior to existing handguns, but in 1855 White was granted a patent, number 12,648: “Improvement in Repeating Fire-arms”.

“People see me, Rollin…” – a detail from White’s 1855 patent

This would be of no significance whatsoever, were it not for the fact that White accidentally included a feature that nobody had patented in the USA. His weapon showed a cylinder bored all the way through, such that cartridges might be inserted from the back – just about the only sensible way to load many firearms.

Such a feature should never have been covered by a patent, because it was already commonplace. In Europe the Lefaucheux Model 1854 was already in production: a revolver using the new self-contained metallic cartridges.

The Lefaucheux Model 1854 embodies the essential arrangement of a modern revolver – but appeared before the Rollin White patent.

In the USA, things weren’t quite so up-to-date, and revolvers used loose black powder. The owner of a revolver had to pour powder into each of the cylinder mouths, ram a bullet into place, and fit a percussion cap onto the rear of each cylinder cavity. The revolver gave you several rapid shots… but after that you had a fiddly job on your hands.

Samuel Colt also held some patents. Years earlier, he’d figured out how to index the cylinders of a revolver so that a fresh one was presented after each shot, based in part upon a mechanism that he’d seen used for a ship’s wheel. Colt’s patents were set to expire in 1857, however, and this led others to design revolvers of their own.

Illustration from Colt’s 1836 patent for a “Revolving gun”

Among them were two partners whose names might be familiar: Horace Smith and Daniel Baird Wesson. They’d worked together before, and as Colt’s patent expiry loomed, Wesson was developing a new cartridge revolver. His research turned up Rollin White’s bizarre patent, and some potentially bad news: the “bored-through cylinder” was protected for years to come.

Smith and Wesson approached Rollin White, and entered into an agreement with him: White would be paid a royalty of 25 cents for every revolver they produced. In return, White granted them exclusivity, and undertook to defend the patent against infringement. Smith and Wesson moved fast: on the day that the key Colt patent expired, their workshops started volume production of their “Model 1”.

While it was in effect, patent 12,648 forced manufacturers other than Smith and Wesson to come up with some of the strangest handguns of the 19th century. There were tapered cartridges that loaded from the front of the cylinder; there were side-loading cylinders; there was a cheeky “dual ignition cylinder” that featured screw-in inserts for old-style percussion caps… that you promptly unscrewed, leaving you with what was effectively a “bored-through cylinder” that would accommodate cartridges.

Close-up of the Brooklyn Firearms’ “Slocum” side-loading cartridge revolver: every chamber has its own sliding panel. The side-loading cylinder would reappear a century later with the heroically ugly Dardick 1100…

Rollin White ought to have made out like a bandit: a 25 cent royalty represented a considerable chunk of the profit on a handgun that sold for $12.75 – not bad pay considering that he should never have been granted the license. In reality, White was kept busy with expensive lawsuits, and although the courts usually found in his favour, Smith and Wesson profited far more than the patent-holder. In an application to extend the patent on the grounds that he had not been fairly compensated, White reported that he had made $71,000 while Smith and Wesson earned over $1 million. As ‘An act for the relief of Rollin White’ the bill went clear through the senate – before being vetoed by President Ulysses S. Grant in January 1870. The patent had caused considerable inconvenience to those working to arm the forces of the Union during the American Civil War, and the former Commanding General of the United States Army wasn’t about to let that go.

Rollin White, not exactly a patent troll but certainly one of the more disruptive unsuccessful inventors of the 19th century, fell into bankruptcy… although ultimately he did somewhat better in the sewing machine business.

The patent was gone, but the lesson in how not to license intellectual property remains true to this day.